Bridge to Bat City

Product Information

Both Armada and Ready Player Two have been optioned for film adaptations ( in Armada's case, three years before it was even published). His books have been published in over fifty countries and have spent more than 100 weeks on The New York Times Best Sellers list.

His first novel, Ready Player One, was a New York Times and USA Today bestseller, appeared on numerous “best of the year” lists, and is set to be adapted into a motion picture by Warner Bros. Cline earned his laurels as part of Austin's geek elite in the '90s with his buzzy script, Fanboys, which finally made it to the screen in 2009 in a version starring starring Jay Baruchel, Kristen Bell, Seth Rogen, and Danny Trejo. The Austin author has just announced the release date for his debut children's novel, The Bridge to Bat City, set in Austin in the 1980s. Cline is otherwise best known for penning the 2015 sci-fi novel Armada, which follows another teenage gamer who discovers that the alien-invasion-themed game he’s been playing is actually a simulator to prepare humanity for a real-world invasion.

This is a weird and wonderful “mostly true tall tale” about how a recently orphaned girl named Opal B Flats helped a family of displaced bats find a new home under the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, Texas. Yes, I was the editor of this book and perhaps biased, but I truly love this book and hope you love it as much as I do! With his signature deep dives into nerdy pop culture futures, Ready Player One author Ernest Cline is one of Austin's biggest-selling authors.

Inspiration for the novel stemmed from Cline’s longtime residency in Austin, TX, which is home to the world’s largest urban bat colony. Said Little, Brown Books’ Editor-in-Chief Alvina Ling, “In Bridge to Bat City, inspired by stories he would tell his kids at bedtime, Ernie Cline has crafted an enchanting tale that weaves together fact and fiction set against the incredible backdrop of 1980s Austin, filled with a vibrant cast of characters, rich music history, activism and environmentalism, and bats! The kids book is described as a “mostly true tall tale” about a recently orphaned young girl named Opal B Flats who forms an unexpected friendship with a music-loving colony of bats and helps them find a new home against all odds.Cline’s Ready Player One is a dystopian, sci-fi novel about Wade Watts, a teenager in the year 2044. Bridge to Bat City is the type of book I loved to read as a child; it’s a book about being an outsider—a weirdo, even! Cline is best known for his debut novel Ready Player One — a beloved work of science fiction that follows 18-year-old Wade Watts as he looks to claim the fortune of a late video game creator by completing a quest to discover an Easter egg hidden within one of his virtual reality worlds.

But just as the farm is starting to feel like home, the bats’ cave is destroyed by a big mining company that has its sights on the family’s land, as well. His book deal was brokered by manager and producing partner Dan Farah and literary agent Yfat Reiss Gendell. There, Opal bonds with Unclue Roscoe over music and befriends a group of orphaned, music-loving bats.He lives in Austin, Texas, with his family, a time-traveling DeLorean, and a large collection of classic video games. But with people afraid of the bats and determined to get rid of them, it'll take a whole lot of courage to prove that this is where the bats--and Opal--belong. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

If Opal and the bats can fit in anywhere, it's the nearby city of Austin, home to their favorite music and a host of wonderfully eccentric characters. Cline followed up his debut novel with 2015's Armada, and a sequel, Ready Player Two, released in 2020.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. In Bridge to Bat City, inspired by stories he would tell his kids at bedtime, Ernie Cline has crafted an enchanting tale that weaves together fact and fiction set against the incredible backdrop of 1980s Austin, filled with a vibrant cast of characters, rich music history, activism and environmentalism, and bats!